FLORIDA HOUSE PASSES MEDICAL MARIJUANA BILL THAT BANS SMOKING WEED

Florida’s House of Representatives proved today there is nothing its grubby little hands can’t screw up. After more than 72 percent of voters statewide voted to legalize medicinal marijuana for people with “debilitating diseases,” a term that includes cancer, AIDS, and Alzheimer’s, the Florida House today passed its own series of rules regulating the state’s new medical weed industry.

“Don’t get me wrong, they made significant improvements, because even the second and third versions of the bill kept getting worse,” says Ben Pollara, policy director for United for Care, the group that pushed for a medical weed constitutional amendment in 2014 and 2016. “But this is still a fatally flawed piece of legislation.”

After voters passed constitutional Amendment 2 to legalize medical marijuana last year, the new law mandated that legislators write a set of rules governing exactly how Floridians can smoke medicinal weed. The initial results, which the state House debuted in February, were disastrous: The original text of HB 1397 banned all forms of smokable, edible, and vape-able weed, leading Pollara to rhetorically ask, “Well, how can you ingest it?” The bill was actually more restrictive than the laws in place before Floridians legalized medical cannabis.

After outcry from patient advocacy groups, House lawmakers amended the bill to at least legalize marijuana edibles and vaporizers for qualifying patients.

But those guidelines are far from the only boneheaded measures crippling the bill. Most notable, the House’s rules require doctors to provide formal “prescriptions” for pot as opposed to “recommendations,” which medical marijuana advocates prefer. The “prescription” requirement hamstrings the bill for an obvious reason: Marijuana is still federally illegal, and doctors who “prescribe” medicinal cannabis can lose their FDA licenses.

“So now, doctors who care about keeping their licenses won’t prescribe marijuana,” Pollara says. “Instead, only the scummiest pill-mill docs will.” In an effort to prevent bad doctors from prescribing marijuana to people who don’t need it, Pollara contends, the House has all but guaranteed that bad doctors will be the only ones handing out weed in Florida.

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